A contemporary of Cobb’s was Freeman Foster, born in 1782 at Brewster before its historic division from Harwich. At the age of ten he was off on fishing-voyages with his father, who had been a whaler; at fourteen he had begun to work his way up to the quarter-deck of the merchant service; his schooling was acquired in the intervals ashore. Curiously, in all his seafaring, he never crossed the “Line,” but cruised between Boston, New Orleans, and the West Indies, the Russian ports of Archangel and Kronstadt, and to Elsinore. At fifty-five he retired to his farm, and in the Embargo War served as an officer in the militia under his neighbor General Cobb. He had been a robust boy and grew to be a mighty man, well over six feet in height and broad in proportion. He had a family of ten children; and his record tallies with that of many another old sea-captain: he “left behind him a reputation for strict integrity and sturdy manhood.” Jeremiah Mayo, of Brewster, born in 1786, was one of nine huge brothers who were said to measure, in the aggregate, something like fifty-five feet. His father meant to make a blacksmith of him, with fishing-voyages, in the season, as relaxation. At sixteen he had a forge of his own in his father’s shop and could shoe all the horses that were brought there. But Jeremiah had no notion of confining his adventures to shoeing horses and catching fish, and at eighteen he was off for a voyage to Marseilles when, for his ability, he received two dollars a month more than any other sailor aboard. On his next voyage to Malaga, Leghorn, Alicante, and Marseilles, his ship, the Industry, was attacked off Gibraltar by the Algerines and escaped with some casualties, among them a flesh wound for Jeremiah. The captain, Gamaliel Bradford, with his leg shot away, had to be left in hospital at Lisbon. On his third voyage he and a young cousin were first and second mate and, the captain falling ill, the two lads, each only nineteen, had to take the ship by the dangerous “north-about” through the Hebrides from Amsterdam to Cadiz; and on a second voyage with the same captain, who seems to have been one of faint heart and would have given up the ship when she sprung a leak, Mayo took her safely to port, and at Bordeaux, where she was sold, sailed her for the French buyers to a Breton port with a cargo of claret, worth there twice its value at Bordeaux. By skilful manœuvre he evaded the British patrol, landed his precious cargo, and returned safely to Bordeaux where he shipped with a Yankee captain, with a cargo of Médoc, for Spain. He arrived at Corunna a few days after the historic battle there, and on a later voyage remembers seeing the monument erected to Sir John Moore. In the Embargo War he was captured by an English frigate, and if the wind had not failed him would have turned the tables by bowling the prize crew into Baltimore as prisoners. “And I wouldn’t have blamed you if